Since I discovered just how great KDE 4 is a couple of months ago, I've been using it full-time and am loving it. In all that time, I've discovered a few tips and tricks that I couldn't live without, and all of them are listed here. Some of these include an inline CLI, split folders, setting up a media keyboard and using advanced wallpapers.

You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

KDE has changed over the past 13 years. The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications. Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications.

In the process, KDE's identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere.

One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

"This shows that KOffice has one of the best technical foundations", says Jan Hambrecht, one of the core developers of KOffice. "It is both lightweight, flexible and very fast, which makes it perfect in embedded environments like a smart phone".

Many Linux users, even the newest ones, love Linux because it is highly customizable. KDE in particular is one desktop environment that is very easy and fun to customize. Whether you want three panels and a rotating slideshow of wallpaper photos from your vacation in Peru, or simply want to make sure text files always open in your favorite text editor, KDE can deliver. One important customization features is file association.
Read the full thing at http://maketecheasier.com/configure-file-associations-in-kde/2009/08/24

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish. The statistics from the bug tracker speak for themselves: 10,000 bugs have been fixed.

Linux distributions strive to include all the useful applications that users will need, but a quality video editor has been lacking for quite some time. Now with KDE4 getting better and better, could an application like Kdenlive fill that gap?

Today, three days before the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit starts, the KDE team released KDE 4.3.0 RC1. RC1 is an early candidate for what will become KDE 4.3.0 at the end of this month.

Artwork has now also been merged, and KDE 4.3 will have a new Plasma look, sported by the new, light "Air" Plasma theme. Oxygen, the default in earlier versions of KDE 4 is still available as an option through the "Desktop Settings" dialog.